Contrary to common views that philosophy is extraneous to cognitivescience, this paper argues that philosophy has a crucial role to play in cognitivescience with respect to generality and normativity. General questions include the nature of theories and explanations, the role of computer simulation in cognitive theorizing, and the relations among the different ﬁelds of cognitivescience. Normative questions include whether human thinking should be Bayesian, whether decision making should maximize (...) expected utility, and how norms should be established. These kinds of general and normative questions make philosophical reﬂection an important part of progress in cognitivescience. Philosophy operates best, however, not with a priori reasoning or conceptual analysis, but rather with empirically informed reﬂection on a wide range of ﬁndings in cognitivescience. (shrink)

This article critically examines the views that psychology ?rst came into existence as a discipline ca. 1879, that philosophy and psychology were estranged in the ensuing decades, that psychology ?nally became scienti?c through the in?uence of logical empiricism, and that it should now disappear in favor of cognitivescience and neuroscience. It argues that psychology had a natural philosophical phase (from antiquity) that waxed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, that this psychology transformed into experimental psychology ca. (...) 1900, that philosophers and psychologists collaboratively discussed the subject matter and methods of psychology in the ?rst two decades of the twentieth century, that the neobehaviorists were not substantively in?uenced by the Vienna Circle, that the study of perception and cognition in psy- chology did not disappear in the behaviorist period and so did not reemerge as a result of arti?cial intelligence, linguistics, and the computer analogy, that although some psychologists adopted the language-of-thought approach of traditional cognitivescience, many did not, and that psychology will not go away because it contributes independently of cognitivescience and neuroscience. (shrink)

Psychology is the study of thinking, and cognitivescience is the interdisciplinary investigation of mind and intelligence that also includes philosophy, artificial intelligence, neuroscience, linguistics, and anthropology. In these investigations, many philosophical issues arise concerning methods and central concepts. The Handbook of Philosophy of Psychology and CognitiveScience contains 16 essays by leading philosophers of science that illuminate the nature of the theories and explanations used in the investigation of minds. Topics discussed include (...) representation, mechanisms, reduction, perception, consciousness, language, emotions, neuroscience, and evolutionary psychology. Key Features - Comprehensive coverage of philosophy of psychology and cognitivescience - Distinguished contributors: leading philosophers in this area - Contributions closely tied to relevant scientific research. (shrink)

When the various disciplines participating in cognitivescience are listed, philosophy almost always gets a guernsey. Yet, a couple of years ago at the conference of the CognitiveScience Society in Boulder (USA), there was no philosophy or philosopher with any prominence on the program. When queried on this point, the organizer (one of the "superstars" of the field) claimed it was partly an accident, but partly also due to an impression among members of (...) the committee that philosophy is basically a waste of time. Philosophy, they thought, is mostly obscure bullshit that does little to help, and much to hinder, real progress in cognitivescience. (shrink)

The philosophy of cognitivescience is concerned with fundamental philosophical and theoretical questions connected to the sciences of the mind. How does the brain give rise to conscious experience? Does speaking a language change how we think? Is a genuinely intelligent computer possible? What features of the mind are innate? Advances in cognitivescience have given philosophers important tools for addressing these sorts of questions; and cognitive scientists have, in turn, found themselves drawing upon (...) insights from philosophy--insights that have often taken their research in novel directions. The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of CognitiveScience brings together twenty-one newly commissioned chapters by leading researchers in this rich and fast-growing area of philosophy. It is an indispensible resource for anyone who seeks to understand the implications of cognitivescience for philosophy, and the role of philosophy within cognitivescience. (shrink)

While the extended cognition (EC) thesis has gained more followers in cognitivescience and in the philosophy of mind and knowledge, our main goal is to discuss a different area of significance of the EC thesis: its relation to philosophy of science. In this introduction, we outline two major areas: (I) The role of the thesis for issues in the philosophy of cognitivescience, such as: How do notions of EC figure in (...) theories or research programs in cognitivescience? Which versions of the EC thesis appear, and with which arguments to support them? (II) The potentials and limits of the EC thesis for topics in general philosophy of science, such as: Can naturalism perhaps be further advanced by means of the more recent EC thesis? Can we understand “big science” or laboratory research better by invoking some version of EC? And can the EC thesis help in overcoming the notorious cognitive/social divide in science studies? (shrink)

There is much good work for philosophers to do in cognitivescience if they adopt the constructive attitude that prevails in science, work toward testable hypotheses, and take on the task of clarifying the relationship between the scientiﬁc concepts and the everyday concepts with which we conduct our moral lives.

Despite being there from the beginning, philosophical approaches have never had a settled place in cognitive research and few cognitive researchers not trained in philosophy have a clear sense of what its role has been or should be. We distinguish philosophy in cognitive research and philosophy of cognitive research. Concerning philosophy in cognitive research, after exploring some standard reactions to this work by nonphilosophers, we will pay particular attention to the methods (...) that philosophers use. Being neither experimental nor computational, they can leave others bewildered. Thought experiments are the most striking example but not the only one. Concerning philosophy of cognitive research, we will pay particular attention to its power to generate and test normative claims, claims about what should and should not be done. (shrink)

Specifically designed to make the philosophy of mind intelligible to those not trained in philosophy, this book provides a concise overview for students and researchers in the cognitive sciences. Emphasizing the relevance of philosophical work to investigations in other cognitive sciences, this unique text examines such issues as the meaning of language, the mind-body problem, the functionalist theories of cognition, and intentionality. As he explores the philosophical issues, Bechtel draws connections between philosophical views and theoretical and (...) experimental work in such disciplines as cognitive psychology, artificial intelligence, linguistics, neuroscience, and anthropology. (shrink)

A popular argument form uses general theories of cognitive architecture to motivate conclusions about the nature of moral cognition. This paper highlights the possibility for modus tollens reversal of this argument form. If theories of cognitive architecture generate predictions for moral cognition, then tests of moral thinking provide feedback to cognitivescience. In certain circumstances, philosophers' introspective attention to their own moral deliberations can provide unique data for these tests. Recognizing the possibility for this sort of (...) feedback helps to illuminate a deep continuity between the disciplines. (shrink)

[from the publisher's website] Questions about the existence and attributes of God form the subject matter of natural theology, which seeks to gain knowledge of the divine by relying on reason and experience of the world. Arguments in natural theology rely largely on intuitions and inferences that seem natural to us, occurring spontaneously—at the sight of a beautiful landscape, perhaps, or in wonderment at the complexity of the cosmos—even to a nonphilosopher. In this book, Helen De Cruz and Johan De (...) Smedt examine the cognitive origins of arguments in natural theology. They find that although natural theological arguments can be very sophisticated, they are rooted in everyday intuitions about purpose, causation, agency, and morality. Using evidence and theories from disciplines including the cognitivescience of religion, evolutionary ethics, evolutionary aesthetics, and the cognitivescience of testimony, they show that these intuitions emerge early in development and are a stable part of human cognition. -/- De Cruz and De Smedt analyze the cognitive underpinnings of five well-known arguments for the existence of God: the argument from design, the cosmological argument, the moral argument, the argument from beauty, and the argument from miracles. Finally, they consider whether the cognitive origins of these natural theological arguments should affect their rationality. (shrink)

Cognitivescience has always included multiple methodologies and theoretical commitments. The philosophy of cognitivescience should embrace, or at least acknowledge, this diversity. Bechtel’s (2009a) proposed philosophy of cognitivescience, however, applies only to representationalist and mechanist cognitivescience, ignoring the substantial minority of dynamically oriented cognitive scientists. As an example of nonrepresentational, dynamical cognitivescience, we describe strong anticipation as a model for circadian systems (Stepp & (...) Turvey, 2009). We then propose a philosophy of science appropriate to nonrepresentational, dynamical cognitivescience. (shrink)

Cognitivescience has always included multiple methodologies and theoretical commitments. The philosophy of cognitivescience should embrace, or at least acknowledge, this diversity. Bechtel's (2009a) proposed philosophy of cognitivescience, however, applies only to representationalist and mechanist cognitivescience, ignoring the substantial minority of dynamically-oriented cognitive scientists. As an example of non-representational, dynamical cognitivescience, we describe strong anticipation as a model for circadian systems (Stepp and Turvey (...) 2009). We then propose a philosophy of science appropriate to non-representational, dynamical cognitivescience. (shrink)

This book is a major contribution to the interdisciplinary project of investigating the true nature of color vision. In recent times, research into color vision has been one of the main success stories of cognitivescience. Each discipline in the field--neuroscience, psychology, linguistics, computer science and philosophy--has contributed significantly to our understanding of color. Evan Thompson provides an accessible review of current scientific and philosophical discussions of color vision. He steers a course between the subjective and (...) objective positions on color, arguing for a relational account. Thompson develops a novel "ecological" approach to color vision in cognitivescience and the philosophy of perception. The book is vital reading for all cognitive scientists and philosophers whose interests touch upon this central area. (shrink)

Philosophy of science is positioned to make distinctive contributions to cognitivescience by providing perspective on its conceptual foundations and by advancing normative recommendations. The philosophy of science I embrace is naturalistic in that it is grounded in the study of actual science. Focusing on explanation, I describe the recent development of a mechanistic philosophy of science from which I draw three normative consequences for cognitivescience. First, insofar as (...)cognitive mechanisms are information-processing mechanisms, cognitivescience needs an account of how the representations invoked in cognitive mechanisms carry information about contents, and I suggest that control theory offers the needed perspective on the relation of representations to contents. Second, I argue that cognitivescience requires, but is still in search of, a catalog of cognitive operations that researchers can draw upon in explaining cognitive mechanisms. Last, I provide a new perspective on the relation of cognitivescience to brain sciences, one which embraces both reductive research on neural components that figure in cognitive mechanisms and a concern with recomposing higher-level mechanisms from their components and situating them in their environments. (shrink)

The concept of emergence is widely used in both the philosophy of mind and in cognitivescience. In the philosophy of mind it serves to refer to seemingly irreducible phenomena, in cognitivescience it is often used to refer to phenomena not explicitly programmed. There is no unique concept of emergence available that serves both purposes.

In this book, Edward Stein offers a clear critical account of the debate about rationality in philosophy and cognitivescience. He discusses concepts of rationality--the pictures of rationality on which the debate centers--and assesses the empirical evidence used to argue that humans are irrational. He concludes that the question of human rationality must be answered not conceptually but empirically, using the full resources of an advanced cognitivescience. Furthermore, he extends this conclusion to argue that (...) empirical considerations are also relevant to the theory of knowledge--in other words, that epistemology should be naturalized. (shrink)

A translation of the renowned French reference book, Vocabulaire de sciences cognitives , the Dictionary of CognitiveScience presents comprehensive definitions of more than 120 terms. The editor and advisory board of specialists have brought together 60 internationally recognized scholars to give the reader a comprehensive understanding of the most current and dynamic thinking in cognitivescience. Topics range from Abduction to Writing, and each entry covers its subject from as many perspectives as possible within the (...) domains of psychology, artificial intelligence, neuroscience, philosophy, and linguistics. This multidisciplinary work is an invaluable resource for all collections. (shrink)

Mindware: An Introduction to the Philosophy of CognitiveScience invites readers to join in up-to-the-minute conceptual discussions of the fundamental issues, problems, and opportunities in cognitivescience. Written by one of the most renowned scholars in the field, this vivid and engaging introductory text relates the story of the search for a cognitive scientific understanding of mind. This search is presented as a no-holds-barred journey from early work in artificial intelligence, through connectionist (artificial neural (...) network) counter-visions, and on to neuroscience, artificial life, dynamics, and robotics. The journey ends with some wide-ranging and provocative speculation about the complex coadaptive dance between mind, culture, and technology. Each chapter opens with a brief sketch of a major research tradition or perspective, followed by short yet substantial critical discussions dealing with key topics and problems. Ranging across both standard philosophical territory and the landscape of cutting-edge cognitivescience, Clark highlights challenging issues in an effort to engage readers in active debate. Topics covered include mental causation; machine intelligence; the nature and status of folk psychology; the hardware/software distinction; emergence; relations between life and mind; the nature of perception, cognition, and action; and the continuity (or otherwise) of high-level human intelligence with other forms of adaptive response. Numerous illustrations, text boxes, and extensive suggestions for further reading enhance the text's utility. Helpful appendices provide background information on dualism, behaviorism, identity theory, consciousness, and more. An exceptional text for introductory and more advanced courses in cognitivescience and the philosophy of mind, Mindware is also essential reading for anyone interested in these fascinating and ever-changing fields. (shrink)

Normal 0 21 false false false ES X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Tabla normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} The purpose of this essay is to offer a Wide view of the diverse currents of thought and debates that have emerged due to the so called: “naturalistic program in epistemology and the philosophy of (...) class='Hi'>science”. The cognitive sciences have been of great importance due to their relationship to thought, and to the fact that philosophy has been, from the beginning, part of the interdisciplinary frame that groups: cognitivescience, computer science, neurology, anthropology, psychology and linguistics. (shrink)

Neuroethology is a branch of biology that studies the neural basis of naturally occurring animal behavior. This science, particularly a recent program called computational neuroethology, has a similar structure to the interdisciplinary endeavor of cognitivescience. I argue that it would be fruitful to conceive of cognitivescience as the computational neuroethology of humans. However, there are important differences between the two sciences, including the fact that neuroethology is much more comparative in its perspective. Neuroethology (...) is a biological science and as such, evolution is a central notion. Its target organisms are studied in the context of their evolutionary history. The central goal of this paper is to argue that cognitivescience can and ought to be more comparative in its approach to cognitive phenomena in humans. I show how the domain of cognitive phenomena can be divided up into four different classes, individuated by the relative phylogenetic uniqueness of the behavior. I then describe how comparative evidence can enrich our understanding in each of these different arenas. (shrink)

Although philosophy has been only a minor contributor to cognitivescience to date, this paper describes two projects in naturalistic philosophy of mind and one in naturalistic philosophy of science that have been pursued during the past 30 years and that can make theoretical and methodological contributions to cognitivescience. First, stances on the mind–body problem (identity theory, functionalism, and heuristic identity theory) are relevant to cognitivescience as it negotiates (...) its relation to neuroscience and cognitive neuroscience. Second, analyses of mental representations address both their vehicles and their contents; new approaches to characterizing how representations have content are particularly relevant to understanding the relation of cognitive agents to their environments. Third, the recently formulated accounts of mechanistic explanation in philosophy of science both provide perspective on the explanatory project of cognitivescience and may offer normative guidance to cognitivescience (e.g., by providing perspective on how multiple disciplinary perspectives can be integrated in understanding a given mechanism). (shrink)

In this paper, we argue that under certain prevalent interpretations of the nature and aims of cognitivescience, theories of cognition generate a forced choice between a conception of cognition which depends on the possibility of a private language, and a conception of cognition which depends on mereological confusions. We argue, further, that this should not pose a fundamental problem for cognitive scientists since a plausible interpretation of the nature and aims of cognitivescience is (...) available that does not generate this forced choice. The crucial difference between these interpretations is that on the one hand the aim of theories of cognition is to tell us what thinking (etc.) is, and on the other it is to tell us what is causally necessary if an intelligent creature is to be able to think. Our argument draws heavily on a Wittgensteinian conception of philosophy in which no philosophical theory can explain what thinking, perceiving, remembering, etc. are, either. The positive, strictly therapeutic, purpose of a philosophy of cognitivescience should be to show that, since the traditional problems which constitute the philosophy of mind are chimerical, there is nothing for philosophical theorizing in cognitivescience to achieve. (shrink)

Does recent work in the cognitive sciences have any implications for theories or methods employed within the philosophy of science itself? It does if one takes a naturalistic approach in which understanding the nature of representations or judgments of representational success in science requires reference to the cognitive capacities or activities of individual scientists. Here I comment on recent contributions from three areas of the cognitive sciences represented respectively by Paul Churchland's neurocomputational perspective, Nancy (...) Nersessian's cognitive-historical approach, and Paul Thagard's computational philosophy of science. The main general conclusion is that we need to replace traditional linguistic notions of representation in science. (shrink)

The rise of cognitivescience in the last half-century has been accompanied by a considerable amount of philosophical activity. No other area within analytic philosophy in the second half of that period has attracted more attention or produced more publications. Philosophical work relevant to cognitivescience has become a sprawling field (extending beyond analytic philosophy) which no one can fully master, although some try and keep abreast of the philosophical literature and of the essential (...) scientific developments. Due to the particular nature of its subject, it touches on a multitude of distinct special branches in philosophy and in science. It has also become quite a difficult, complicated and technical field, to the point of being nearly impenetrable for philosophers or scientists coming from other fields or traditions. Finally, it is contentious: Cognitivescience is far from having reached stability, it is still widely regarded with suspicion, philosophers working within its confine have sharp disagreements amongst themselves, and philosophers standing outside, especially (but not only) of non-analytic persuasion, are often inclined to see both cognitivescience and its accompanying philosophy as more or less confused or even deeply flawed. The sensible way to go under the circumstances, or so one might judge, would be to pick a sample of salient topics, in the present case, philosophical discussions of some central foundational issues, in the hope thereby of giving the reader a sense of what the field is about. This however is not the path I propose to take. There are two reasons for choosing another tack. The negative reason is that there is now available a plethora of excellent expositions, of any length one might desire, from one-page summaries to chapter- or volume-length introductions, of central topics in philosophy of mind (which constitutes in turn the core of what most philosophers think of as philosophy of cognitivescience: more on this in a moment)1.. (shrink)

ID: 89 / Parallel 4k: 2 Single paper Topics: Philosophy of mind, Philosophy of science Keywords: CognitiveScience, Cognitive Neuroscience, Mechanistic explanations, Reductionism, Normativity, Generality, Emerging School of Philosophers of Science. The role of philosophy in cognitivescience: mechanistic explanations, normativity, generality Mohammadreza Haghighi Fard Leiden University, Netherlands, The; haghighiphil@aol.com Introduction -/- Cognitivescience, as an interdisciplinary research endeavour, seeks to explain mental activities such as reasoning, remembering, language (...) use, and problem solving, and the explanations it advances commonly involve descriptions of the mechanisms responsible for these activities. Cognitive mechanisms are distinguished from the mechanisms invoked in other domains of biology by involving the processing of information. Many of the philosophical issues discussed in the context of cognitivescience involve the nature of information processing. For philosophy of science, a central question is what counts as a scientific explanation. But what is a mechanistic explanation and how does it work, how can philosophy of science use it as a solution for the problem of integration in cognitivescience? By answering these questions and merging my answers with discussion of concepts of philosophy, normativity and generality, I will investigate the following claim. -/- I claim that philosophy by using strength concepts such as normativity, generality, and a mechanistic philosophy of explanations, can be a most important contributor to cognitivescience. I also investigate how philosophy of science could be (can be) a bridge between psychology and neuroscience. We need a distinction between philosophy of cognitivescience and philosophy in cognitivescience; I am talking about the latter. -/- This claim is very important for the integration and the future of the interdisciplinary field known as cognitivescience. -/- Philosophy as a true cognitivescience -/- When the CognitiveScience Society was founded, in the late 1970s, philosophy, neuroscience, and anthropology were playing smaller roles. The three disciplines that formed the core group were artificial intelligence, psychology, and linguistics. The curious thing is that George Miller, a psychologist and an important founder of cognitive sciences in a hexagon diagram that he presented, put philosophy at the top of the diagram and neuroscience at the very bottom. There is enough agreement now that neuroscience is the most important contributor to cognitivescience and there are fair connections between philosophy and neuroscience. In that diagram there was almost no connection between philosophy and neuroscience. -/- The developments and rise of cognitivescience in the last half-century has been accompanied by considerable amount of philosophical activity. Perhaps no other area within analytic philosophy in the second half of that period has attracted more attention or produced more publications. (Bechtel and Graham, 1998. Rumelhart and Bly 1999. Bechtel, Mandik, Mundale 2001. Thagard, 2007. Bennett and Dennett et al, 2007. Bennett and Hacker, 2008. Andler, 2009. Frankish and Ramsey, 2012.) -/- Many philosophers of science offer conclusions that have a direct bearing on cognitivescience and its practitioners can profit from closer engagement with the rest of cognitivescience. For example, William Bechtel has discussed three projects, two in naturalistic philosophy of mind and one in naturalistic philosophy of science that have been pursued during the past 30 years, that he contends, can make theoretical and methodological contributions to cognitivescience (Bechtel, 2009). Paul Thagard is another example of the mentioned emerging school of philosophers of science that define cognitivescience as the interdisciplinary investigation of mind and intelligence (Thagard, 2006). Thagard by presenting some general but important philosophical questions such as, “What is the nature of the explanations and theories developed in cognitivescience?”, and by providing answers to these central questions has showed how philosophy of science can help cognitivescience by the advantage of its generality. Andrew Brook, however, believes that philosophical approaches have never had a settled place in cognitivescience but he is listed in a group of the philosophers of science that they are contributing very closely the cognitivescience (Brook, 2009). Daniel Dennett , as well as being a member the mentioned naturalistic philosophers of science, believes that there is much good work for philosophers to do in cognitivescience if they adopt the constructive attitude that prevails in science. -/- What are mechanisms? Let us begin abstractly before considering an example. Mechanisms are collections of entities and activities organized together to do something (cf. Machamer, Darden, & Craver, 2000; Craver & Darden, 2001; Bechtel &Richardson, 1993; Glennan, 1996). These explanations are known as ‘mechanistic explanations’. By using and developing these mechanistic explanations of philosophy of science one can draw normative consequences for cognitivescience. Paul Thagard (Thagard, 2006 and 2009), William Bechtel (Bechtel, 2008 and 2009), Andrew Brook (Brook, 2008) investigated and promoted using the ‘normativity’ in philosophy to show a better and crucial role for philosophy of science in an interdisciplinary known as cognitivescience. Some philosophers have thought that, in order to pursue this normative function, philosophy must distance itself from empirical matters, but there are examples where the investigations of descriptive and normative issues go hand in hand. ( Thagard, 2009). -/- I will investigate how we can reduce a higher-level science such as psychology to neuroscience without the problems of reductionism but via mechanistic explanations. By problem I mean psychology does not lose its autonomy. -/- Conclusion -/- If cognitivescience is all about understanding the human mind, or if cognitivescience is the interdisciplinary investigation of mind and intelligence, since the whole life of philosophy was involving with the ways of knowing (epistemology) and conceptions of reality (metaphysics), also philosophy has considered the so-called mind-body problem ( identity theory, functionalism, and heuristic identity theory) , then philosophy could be the most deserved discipline to be a most contributor in cognitivescience. I tried to discuss this by using the three advantages in philosophy, normativity, and generality and by introducing an emerging school of mechanistic (not mechanical) philosophers. One thing left, as cognitivescience is a two-way street, philosophers need also to stop in a station of cognitivescience and learn from the most important advances in brain and neuroscience. Key references : CognitiveScience, Cognitive Neuroscience, Mechanistic explanations, Reductionism, Normativity, Generality, Emerging School of Philosophers of Science. (shrink)

Duhem’s problem arises especially in scientific contexts where the tools and procedures of measurement and analysis are numerous and complex. Several philosophers of cognitivescience have cited its manifestations in fMRI as grounds for skepticism regarding the epistemic value of neuroimaging. To address these Duhemian arguments for skepticism, I offer an alternative approach based on Deborah Mayo’s error-statistical account in which Duhem's problem is more fruitfully approached in terms of error probabilities. This is illustrated in examples such as (...) the use of probabilistic brain atlases, comparison of different preprocessing protocols with respect to their error characteristics, and statistical modeling of fMRI data. These examples demonstrate the ways in which we can better understand and formulate the general methodological problem and direct the way toward alternative approaches to neuroimaging in philosophy of cognitivescience, in which we can be more balanced and productive in our scrutiny of the epistemic value of neuroimaging studies. (shrink)

The Phenomenological Mind, by Shaun Gallagher and Dan Zahavi, is part of a recent initiative to show that phenomenology, classically conceived as the tradition inaugurated by Edmund Husserl and not as mere introspection, contributes something important to cognitivescience. (For other examples, see “References” below.) Phenomenology, of course, has been a part of cognitivescience for a long time. It implicitly informs the works of Andy Clark (e.g. 1997) and John Haugeland (e.g. 1998), and Hubert Dreyfus (...) explicitly uses it (e.g. 1992). But where the former use phenomenology in the background as broad context and Dreyfus uses it primarily (though not exclusively) as a critique of conventional AI, Gallagher and Zahavi wish to indicate a positive and constructive place for it within cognitivescience. They do not recommend that we simply accept pronouncements of thinkers like Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre and Merleau‐Ponty and apply them to questions of cognition, but that we use revised forms of phenomenology to illuminate dimensions of cognitive experience that are missing in current research. The book is presented as an “introduction to philosophy of mind and cognitivescience” written from a phenomenological perspective. It seeks to justify the use of phenomenology in cognitivescience by showing what kinds of questions it asks and answers, the variety of uses to which it has recently been put and the fruitfulness of some of its findings. The catalog of topics, for the most part, matches other introductions to the philosophy of mind, such as questions of method, consciousness, perception, intentionality, embodiment, action, agency and other minds. One issue presented here that is not generally dealt with in existing philosophy of mind and cognitivescience texts is temporality, a mainstay of the continental tradition. After an introductory chapter that places phenomenology in the context of other approaches, the book lays out the main tenets of phenomenological method. Here, one encounters expected components of phenomenology: the epoché (described below), phenomenological reduction, eidetic variation, and so on. This traditional fare is soon followed by some potential surprises, namely, attempts to “naturalize” phenomenology, a few attempts to formalize it, and the emergence of ‘neurophenomenology’. Each of these is a bit surprising because Husserl was a vocal critic of naturalism, seeing transcendental phenomenology as an alternative to the empirical study of consciousness. He was also skeptical about the possibilities of mathematizing phenomenology. Gallagher and Zahavi acknowledge these points, but since they are not repeating history or undertaking exegesis, strict adherence to canonical phenomenology is not required. Naturalizing phenomenology means recognizing that “the phenomena it studies are part of nature and are therefore also open to empirical investigation” (p.. (shrink)

Philosophy interfaces with cognitivescience in three distinct but related areas. First, there is the usual set of issues that fall under the heading of philosophy of science (explanation, reduction, etc.), applied to the special case of cognitivescience. Second, there is the endeavor of taking results from cognitivescience as bearing upon traditional philosophical questions about the mind, such as the nature of mental representation, consciousness, free will, perception, emotions, memory, (...) etc. Third. (shrink)

Philosophers of music (and also music theorists) have recognized for a long time that research in the sciences, especially psychology, might have import for their own work. (Langer 1941 and Meyer 1956 are good examples.) However, while scientists had been interested in music as a subject of research (e.g., Helmholtz 1912, Seashore 1938), the discipline known as psychology of music, or more broadly cognitivescience of music, came into its own only around 1980 with the publication of several (...) landmark works. Among the most important of these were The Psychol- ogy of Music (1980), a collection of papers edited by the psychologist Diana Deutsch, and A Generative Theory of Tonal Music (1983) by music theorist and composer Fred Lerdahl and linguist Ray Jackendoff. These works and others made possible the first attempts to apply scientific research to philosophical issues concerning music (e.g., Raffman 1993, DeBellis 1995). Since the 1980’s, of course, a great deal of research has been done in cognitivescience, philosophy, and music. For philosophers, there are perhaps three topics with respect to which findings in the cognitive sciences are most likely to be germane—the nature of musical understanding, the role of emotions or feelings in music, and the evaluation of musical works. This brief overview will describe some of the scientific research that has been done on these topics, and then indicate how it might be philosophically significant. (shrink)

The Phenomenological Mind is the first book to properly introduce fundamental questions about the mind from the perspective of phenomenology. Key questions and topics covered include: What is phenomenology? naturalizing phenomenology and the empirical cognitive sciences phenomenology and consciousness consciousness and self-consciousness, including perception and action time and consciousness, including William James intentionality the embodied mind action knowledge of other minds situated and extended minds phenomenology and personal identity Interesting and important examples are used throughout, including phantom limb syndrome, (...) blindsight and self-disorders in schizophrenia, making The Phenomenological Mind an ideal introduction to key concepts in phenomenology, cognitivescience and philosophy of mind. (shrink)

Colour fascinates all of us, and scientists and philosophers have sought to understand the true nature of colour vision for many years. In recent times, investigations into colour vision have been one of the main success stories of cognitivescience, for each discipline within the field - neuroscience, psychology, linguistics, computer science and artificial intelligence, and philosophy - has contributed significantly to our understanding of colour. Evan Thompson's book is a major contribution to this interdisciplinary project. (...) Colour Vision provides an accessible review of the current scientific and philosophical discussions of colour vision. Thompson steers a course between the subjective and objective positions on colour, arguing for a relational account. This account develops a novel `ecological' approach to colour vision in cognitivescience and the philosophy of perception. It is vital reading for all cognitive scientists and philosophers whose interests touch upon this central area. (shrink)

This paper provides a general defense of the idea that the cognitive sciences provide models that are useful for exploring issues that have traditionally occupied philosophers of science. Questions about the nature of theories, for example, are assimilated into studies of the nature of cognitive representations, while questions concerning the choice of theories fall under studies of human judgment and decision making. The implications of adopting "a cognitive approach" are explored, particularly the rejection of foundationist epistemologies (...) which might provide a philosophical justification of science. Instead I suggest a scientific foundation provided by evolutionary biology and the scientific goal of explaining science as a human phenomenon. (shrink)

The philosophy of science has lost its self-confidence. Structures in Science (2001) is an advanced textbook that explicates, updates and integrates the best insights of logical empiricism and its main critics. This "neo-classical approach" aims at providing heuristic patterns for research.The book introduces four ideal types of research programs (descriptive, explanatory, design and explicative) and reanimates the distinction between observational laws and proper theories without assuming a theory-free language. It explicates various patterns of explanation by subsumption and (...) specification as well as structures in reductive and other types of interlevel research. Its threefold analysis of theory evaluation leads to new characterizations of confirmation, empirical progress, and truth approximation. What emerges are partial analogies between progress in nomological research, presented in detail in From Instrumentalism to Constructive Realism (2000) and progress in explicative and design research. Finally, special chapters are devoted to design research programs, computational philosophy of science, the structuralist approach to theories, and research ethics.The present synopsis of Structures in Science highlights the main topics, the final emphasis being on design research and research ethics. (shrink)

Cognitivescience is an interdisciplinary research endeavor focusing on human cognitive phenomena such as memory, language use, and reasoning. It emerged in the second half of the 20th century and is charting new directions at the beginning of the 21st century. This chapter begins by identifying the disciplines that contribute to cognitivescience and reviewing the history of the interdisciplinary engagements that characterize it. The second section examines the role that mechanistic explanation plays in (...) class='Hi'>cognitivescience, while the third focuses on the importance of mental representations in specifically cognitive explanations. The fourth section considers the interdisciplinary nature of cognitivescience and explores how multiple disciplines can contribute to explanations that exceed what any single discipline might accomplish. The conclusion sketches some recent developments in cognitivescience and their implications for philosophers. (shrink)

The article examines some of the main theses about self-awareness developed in recent analytic philosophy of mind (especially the work of Bermúdez), and points to a number of striking overlaps between these accounts and the ones to be found in phenomenology. Given the real risk of unintended repetitions, it is argued that it would be counterproductive for philosophy of mind to ignore already existing resources, and that both analytical philosophy and phenomenology would profit from a more open (...) exchange. (shrink)

Drawing on the results of modem psychology and cognitivescience we suggest that the traditional theory of concepts is no longer tenable, and that the alternative account proposed by Kuhn may now be seen to have independent empirical support quite apart from its success as part of an account of scientific change. We suggest that these mechanisms can also be understood as special cases of general cognitive structures revealed by cognitivescience. Against this background, incommensurability (...) is not an insurmountable obstacle to accepting Kuhn's position, as many philosophers of science still believe. Rather it becomes a natural consequence of cognitive structures that appear in all human beings. (shrink)

Evolutionary thinking has expanded in the last decades, spreading from its traditional stronghold - the explanation of speciation and adaptation in Biology - to new domains including the human sciences. The essays in this collection attest to the illuminating power of evolutionary thinking when applied to the understanding of the human mind. The contributors to Cognition, Evolution and Rationality use an evolutionary standpoint to approach the nature of the human mind, including both cognitive and behavioral functions. Cognitive (...) class='Hi'>science is by its nature an interdisciplinary subject and the essays use a variety of disciplines including the Philosophy of Science, the Philosophy of Mind, Game Theory, Robotics and Computational Neuroanatomy to investigate the workings of the mind. The topics covered by the essays range from general methodological issues to long-standing philosophical problems such as how rational human beings actually are. This book will be of interest across a number of fields, including philosophy, evolutionary theory and cognitivescience. (shrink)